Category: nuclear weapons

NBC News tells us that ISIS propaganda leaflets have been found near Marine Corps Base Quantico, VA. Which also happens to be the location of the FBI Academy. The leaflets reportedly announce in Arabic that “We are here from Mexico and came by train”.

But I am sure there isn’t anything to worry about. In fact, I am positive that they are counterfeit. Why?

Because the chances of Ebola reaching US shores is “unlikely”. Al-Nusrah Islamic extremists are “moderate”. The Benghazi attacks were not terrorism. The IRS scandal was only low-level employees in Cincinnati. Fast and Furious was started under Bush. The Obamas didn’t know about Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-Semitic rants. The biggest terrorist threat to the US is from white male Veterans who believe in the Constitution. Global warming exists and is Man’s fault. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. The unemployment rate is dropping. We can trust Iran not to build nukes. This Administration isn’t anti-Israel. The CIA didn’t tell the President about ISIS. Voter ID laws are unpopular. No lobbyists hold policy jobs. This will be the most transparent Presidency ever.

So however could I doubt Jeh Johnson and his razor-sharp spokespeople at DHS when they tell me something such as terrorists crossing our open borders is “categorically false”? It’s not like Johnson’s skin color played any part in being hired as DHS Secretary, because race is never an issue with this White House.

These leaflets may be forgeries, and represent nothing more than someone’s idea of a prank. Then again, they may be the genuine article. Whatever, the one thing we can count on from the Obama Administration is full disclosure of the truth, regardless of any embarrassment that it might cause. It isn’t as if they would lie to the American people, would they?

Brad’s excellent piece about the weak-minded simps on the far-left being anti-Israel, and openly sympathetic to Hamas, can be corroborated around most any college campus on either coast. Leftist Progressive “intellectuals” of all ages rail against Israel and the Jews so vehemently that it would make Julius Streicher blush. They are too dogmatic and stupid to figure out that Hamas would perpetrate on Israeli men, women, and children precisely what ISIS did this week, when it massacred some 1,500 young Iraqi men (filming much of it) in scenes reminiscent of SS Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front. All Hamas lacks is the means. Which leftists in this country (which include Mssrs Kerry and Obama) seem ever so willing to give them. To those who would recoil at such a comparison, I would ask, just what do you think “destruction of the Zionist Jews” means? Hamas is also supported wholeheartedly with weapons and money (so much the more since sanctions were lifted) by our old friend Iran. (Whom we are told we should trust not to build a nuclear weapon. They don’t mean what they say about annihilating Israel, either.)

This willful blindness is, however, not a new paradigm. Obama’s, and the American media’s, pandering to Muslims and outright sympathy for Hamas and its soulless butchers in Gaza, have a familiar ring to them. Who else but the incomparable Kipling tells us of such a precedent?

Boh Da Thone was a warrior bold:
His sword and his rifle were bossed with gold,

And the Peacock Banner his henchmen bore
Was stiff with bullion, but stiffer with gore.

He shot at the strong and he slashed at the weak
From the Salween scrub to the Chindwin teak:

He crucified noble, he scarified mean,
He filled old ladies with kerosene:

While over the water the papers cried,
“The patriot fights for his countryside!”

So there you have it. That said, rather than seeing members of Hamas squashed by a fat railroad employee, I would be ever so happy to see some fuel-air explosive dropped on one of their parades. Same with ISIS. Too bad Obama, the media, and the far-left are so sympathetic to the former and indifferent about the latter. T’ain’t much new under the sun.

This little tidbit managed to elude the American press. The SAME American press that can tell you nothing about Benghazi, but everything about the George Washington Bridge scandal, nothing about Barack Obama’s college transcripts, but everything about George W. Bush’s military service (even if they have to make it up.)

From Iran’s Fars News Agency, via Drudge, these statements from Brigadier General Hossein Salami of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps:

“Today, we can destroy every spot which is under the Zionist regime’s control with any volume of fire power (that we want) right from here,” Salami said, addressing a conference in Tehran on Tuesday dubbed ‘the Islamic World’s Role in the Geometry of the World Power’.

“Islam has given us this wish, capacity and power to destroy the Zionist regime so that our hands will remain on the trigger from 1,400km away for the day when such an incident (confrontation with Israel) takes place,” he added.

Well, given by Islam and Barack Obama. I am sure the General doesn’t MEAN anything by it. It isn’t like he has the ear of the Supreme Leader or anything. And I am certain that Iran is bargaining for uranium enrichment in good faith. The Israelis? They’re just paranoid.

A resurgent Russia, under a ruthless and savvy autocrat, is flexing its muscles in Eastern Europe. Communist China is threatening our allies and our interests in the Pacific. That same Russia and China appear headed for closer relations. Iran, thanks to the feckless naivete of Obama and Kerry, are poised to have nuclear weapons, with which they have vowed to destroy Israel. North Korea, in league with that very same Iran, continues to act provocatively, with full approval of the PRC, despite public protestations to the contrary. The “Arab Spring” has unleashed radical Islamists throughout the region. Russian influence throughout the Middle East has been exponentially enhanced by America’s “leading from behind” fiasco. We are without a viable grand strategy, and are slicing our Armed Forces to well below the levels at which we can defend our interests and deter our adversaries.

“Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country’s top diplomat,” Kerry said in the letter issued on Friday to all 275 US embassies and across the State Department.

Yep. Climate change. America’s foreign policy team is being pushed around and laughed at for the pathetically weak milquetoasts they are. Our credibility in the world is sinking alarmingly. Our adversaries and rivals are acting with impunity, virtually without fear of repercussion from what remains (for the time being) the most powerful nation on earth. Our allies are frantically scrambling to fill the security gap where America once stood. What strategic leverage we might have, abundant sources of fossil fuel energy, is being deliberately suppressed by these same far-left “environmentalists” in the name of “saving the planet”.

An editorial this Friday in the leftist rag that passes for the local paper here in Upper Valley of Vermont tried to make the argument that somehow Republicans were being disingenuous in claiming Obama to be a strong-arm quasi-dictator on the one hand, while accusing him of being pathetically weak on the other. Of course, the columnist assiduously avoided the fact that Vladimir Putin (and Rouhani in Iran, Assad in Syria, etc.) is immune to intimidation by Eric Holder, or Lois Lerner, or Kathleen Sibelius. Foreign policy means dealing with people whom cannot be silenced by Obama being able to sic the apparatus of government upon those who defy him. Alinsky’s “rules for radicals” work for domestic politics, when opponents are not willing to kill and starve and imprison on a massive scale to achieve their goals. But ideologues like Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, and Barack Obama are way out of their element in dealing with foreign leaders who understand REAL power. Leaders who call their bluffs regarding “red lines” and “severe consequences”, and such. Which results in President Obama “prancing around swinging his purse at Moscow”, as SKK so eloquently expressed. Putin and Lavrov have shown utter contempt for Obama and Kerry, and it is not difficult to understand why.

So in place of actual statesmanship, John Kerry injects tripe about “climate change”. (Which used to be “global warming”, if you are keeping score, until far-left environmentalists could no longer obscure the fact that the world was not, in fact, getting warmer. Not to be confused with “global cooling”, which 40 years ago was the “settled science”, until they could no longer obscure the fact that the world was not, in fact, getting cooler.) It is not at all clear how a diplomat in an embassy or a consulate can quite go about “elevat(ing) the environment in everything we do”, or how that got to be the job of a diplomat in the first place. Oh, wait. Because it was one of John Kerry’s “causes”.

“The environment has been one of the central causes of my life.”

Right. Along with claiming America was “the world’s monster”, advocating for wealth-redistribution statist socialism, collaborating with our nation’s enemies (worthy of a drone strike?), and fomenting anti-American sentiment wherever he went. Oh, and avoiding taxes due on his yacht (where he spent significant time during the recent Egypt crisis and then lied about it, by the way). And jet-setting to any of several multimillion-dollar homes. No word on whether advancing America’s strategic interests appears anywhere in there.

And it ain’t like his boss drove a Prius to his Florida golf vacation. Which comes just weeks after his Hawaii golf vacation.

The United States will pay a terrible price for the mind-boggling incompetence resident in the people entrusted with our foreign policy. They, themselves, the Kerrys and Obamas, the Hillarys, they won’t. But we will. It is difficult to overstate that incompetence. Though, between last week’s appearance on Meet the Press, and this inane memo to our diplomats this week, Kerry seems as if he is sure giving it a try.

At the simplest level of budgetary planning, the Secretary’s budget statements ignore the fact that the Congressional Budget Office projects that the Department’s failure to manage the real-world crises in personnel, modernization, and readiness costs will have as negative an overall budget impact over time as Sequestration will. Ignoring the Department’s long history of undercosting its budget, its cost overruns, and the resulting cuts in forces, modernization, and readiness means one more year of failing to cope with reality. Presenting an unaffordable plan is as bad as failing to budget enough money.

Cordesman gets to the real meat of our failure of strategic (dare I say “national strategic”?) thinking, as well.

He talks about cuts in personnel, equipment, and force strength in case-specific terms, but does not address readiness and does not address any plan or provide any serious details as to what the United States is seeking in in terms of changes in its alliances and partnerships, and its specific goals in force levels, deployments, modernization, personnel, and readiness.

He holds nothing back in his contempt for the process of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), either.

Worse, we are going to leave these issues to be addressed in the future by another mindless waste of time like the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). All the past QDRs have been set so far in the future to be practical or relevant. Each successive QDR has proved to be one more colostomy bag after another of half-digested concepts and vague strategic priorities filled with noise and futility and signifying nothing.

Cordesman saves his best for last, however.

Like all of his recent predecessors, Secretary Hagel has failed dismally to show the U.S. has any real plans for the future and to provide any meaningful sense of direction and real justification for defense spending. The best that can be said of his speech on the FY2015 defense budget is that U.S. strategy and forces will go hollow in a kinder and gentler manner than simply enforcing sequestration.

We do need to avoid cutting our forces, military capabilities, and defense spending to the levels called for in sequestration. But this is no substitute for the total lack of any clear goals for the future, for showing that the Department of Defense has serious plans to shape a viable mix of alliances and partnerships, force levels, deployments, modernization, personnel, and readiness over the coming Future Year Defense Plan.

I don’t always agree with Cordesman’s assertions, but he is just about always a thoughtful if provocative commenter on Defense and National Security issues, and his analysis of SECDEF Hagel’s remarks are spot-on. We are headed for a hollow force, despite its smaller size, as many of us have feared all along. This, despite all the promises and admonitions of this Administration and our Pentagon leadership. Go have a read.

Well, that didn’t take long. From The Weekly Standard, via Drudge. Just 48 hours after sanctions were lifted against Iran, and several billion dollars in assets and capital were released, Iran’s Foreign Minister tells the world Iran’s true intentions, and lets the world know that Barack Obama, John Kerry, and the United States were played for fools. Or worse.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Zyx-n8GWU]

The worst aspect of this statement from the Iranian Foreign Minister is that I have a sinking suspicion Zarif is telling the truth. Which means, of course, that the American people were lied to (again) by this Administration, because the terms of a “deal” with Iran were so unfavorable as to be a virtual sell-out. So, essentially, what we have lifted three decades of sanctions for is an Iranian promise not to enrich uranium past five percent. With virtually no way to verify if they comply or not. Despite UN Security Council Resolution after UN Security Council Resolution demanding Iran stop enrichment altogether. Already, the talk about sanctions being lifted has had the profound effect of bolstering Iranian currency, which was once in free-fall. Now, with the injection of the hard capital released as the sanctions are lifted, any economic leverage we had to turn the screws on the recalcitrant supporter of terrorism and violence the world over, is gone. G-O-N-E.

Congress, for its part, has feet as cold as this Vermont evening, and wants no part of the Iran deal. A bipartisan coalition has threatened to vote further sanctions against Iran, carrying enough votes to override Obama’s veto. Not getting the hint, Obama then threatened (why is it that all of his threats are directed at political opponents and not national enemies?) to use executive orders to override sanctions against Iran.

Expect that Iran’s nuclear program will continue, unabated. Enrichment to weapons grade can re-start at any time, if indeed it is ever halted. The sanctions which had allowed the West leverage over the sponsor of terrorism are now lifted, and cannot be easily, if ever, resumed. Sort of like putting toothpaste back in the tube. Even if Congress wishes to do so, our own President has promised to thwart the effort.

So, not long from now, Iran will have a nuclear weapon to put atop the ICBMs they are jointly developing with the North Koreans. They will once again threaten Israel with destruction, and have exponentially increased their ability to do so, with the acquiescence of the United States, especially Barack Obama.

One has to wonder whether Barack Obama is more Neville Chamberlain or Vidkun Quisling.

There was a secret debate happening in the Defense Department and the CIA in which some people thought that all Muslims were a problem, some believed that only al-Qa’ida was a problem, and still others thought the Muslim Brotherhood was a problem.

The main problem, however, was that all Islamism was a political threat, but it was the second position that eventually won over the Obama administration. Take note of this, since 2009, if you wanted to build your career and win policy debates, only al-Qa’ida was a problem. The Muslim Brotherhood was not a threat; after all, it did not participate in September 11. This view was well known in policy circles, but it was easy to mistake this growing hegemony as temporary.

The importance of moral courage in the senior uniformed and civilian leadership cannot be overemphasized. Nor, unfortunately, can the glaring lack of that courage in the actions and words of blatant political sycophants like Ray Mabus, Mike Mullen, George Casey, Marty Dempsey, Sam Locklear, be minimized. The indicators of their pliability to political masters, and their willingness to compromise their oaths and integrity, are symptoms of a much more damaging disease.

Some high-ranking defense department officials–for example, one on the secretary of defense’s level–were pressured to fire anti-Muslim Brotherhood people. I know of at least five such incidences.

Oh good. After all, the Brotherhood is “largely secular”, or so we are told. We must pay no attention to Brotherhood’s motto, or the words of their founder. To point those out, it would seem, is to jeopardize one’s livelihood.

Al Banna: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Brotherhood motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The quashing of dissenting voices has to start with the subjugation of those who hold influential positions, and are ostensibly to supply meaningful advice and counsel. The Obama Administration has become a notorious echo chamber, and has become so along ideological lines. Worse, the opinions and views which prevail are from those with no discernible qualifications or talents. Quite the contrary, the people who hold sway in our Defense and State Departments, and in National Security posts, are and have been mediocre, talentless ideological fops, remarkable only for their arrogance and demonstrated lack of acumen in international affairs. Figures like Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Jim Clapper, and John Kerry have aided in the non-stop catastrophes that have characterized US foreign policy during the Obama Administration, from the Cairo Apology speech to the Munich-esque Iran deal.

Sandwiched in that dreary record of abject failure is the forcing of a Muslim Brotherhood government on the people of Egypt. When Egyptians rose up by the MILLIONS in the streets this past July, and ousted Muhammed Morsi’s brutal theocracy, the Obama Administration turned its back on Egypt, asserting that a “democratic regime” had been overthrown by military coup against the will of the people. Ignored, of course, was that the Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt was guilty of brutal repression of its citizens, and was openly and systematically murdering and driving Egypt’s millenia-old Coptic Christian community out of the country. Also ignored was Morsi’s immediate renouncing of the peace treaty with Israel, and tacit support for Islamist infiltration into the Sinai. Without US support, Egypt has turned to the new power broker in the Middle East, Putin’s Russia. Yes, the same Russia who has propped up Assad in Syria, and who is a long-time benefactor of post-1979 Iran. THAT Russia.

Rubin’s missive is worth the read in its entirety. It highlights how our President and his Administration has come to turn its back on its allies, negotiate away US interested and influence, and sought to treat America’s sworn ideological enemies as allies. And why any voice raised in objection to such a course is decidedly unwelcome.

The result of such ideological pactum servae is the imbecilic notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular”, and that an alliance with “moderate Islamists” in Syria is something to strive for. The Muslim Brotherhood is, as it has always been, the most Islamist of factions. To behave as if they are otherwise is either foolhardy or deliberately subversive. And finding a “moderate Islamist” is somewhat akin to finding a tall midget.

But life got in the way, so all you get is the clip, and just a bit of commentary.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WagAKBuc_o&w=448&h=252&hd=1]

ICBM warheads reach a top velocity of around Mach 25, but they also decelerate as they return from space. The earliest US reentry vehicle, the Mk4, used a blunt body for best heat disipation and to fit the relatively large physics package. That blunt shape meant the Mk4 was actually subsonic by the time it reached the surface.